Why not just do it as they seem to do in Mac OSX, the actual directory
names on disk are in English and then translated in Nautilus only. So if
you access your home directory by a powertool such as the terminal you
go to ~/Desktop no matter if it's named Skrivbord (Swedish) in Nautilus.

And KDE, and openoffice and mozilla, and over NFS to other system types,
and xfce. No that one really is ugly and asking for confused users. Even
renaming them in some future gnome-language tool would be preferable
(and might be sensible anyway).

I agree for applications but not for different desktop environments.
Since this conversation would most likely take place in GnomeVFS any
application using that shouldn't have a problem.

And iirc people are working on both openoffice and mozilla to integrate
it better with GNOME by providing GnomeVFS backend. (I might remember
wrongly though).